Camera issues

I have no idea what is going on with my camera. A little red hand with an exclamation mark appeared in the window and it didn't take the picture - the click didn't happen. I changed some setting from "1 M" to 0.3 M." I took another picture and it worked. Then I called my mom to get suggestions and decided to look for old pictures that weren't mine and delete them, thinking this seemed like a memory issue. There weren't any - there were only 32 pictures on the camera and a bunch of pictures I did take were also missing, in random places throughout the trip. The last picture, however, was there.

I called my mom back and she didn't have any more ideas so I just decided to go try and take pictures, see if the problem happened again immediately or if it was fixed. I took quite a few pictures around the university (of my favorite places there) and the same symbol appeared a few times in white, then went away. The click and the momentary freeze-frame kept happening so it seemed like it was working. I checked the photos and none of the new ones had appeared; the same 32 were there. I thought for a bit that maybe there were multiple storage spots in the camera and I was viewing the wrong folder or something, but I couldn't find anything in the menu that looked like that. So now I'm just blindly clicking the camera and hoping that pictures are being taken, the missing ones still exist, and we'll find them when we plug the thing into the computer. Otherwise the photo record of this trip is going to be pretty poor.